“This is it”: the song Phil Collins only ever played once
It must be so satisfying when a song just falls into place when writing it and to find every element of it feeling like the most natural and intuitive decision you’ve ever made in your artistic career. Brian Wilson used to regularly speak of how there were songs that were ready to burst out of his chest, and Elton John was alleged to have written ‘Your Song’ in a matter of minutes. Some masterpieces do, of course, take much longer to create, but it’s probably the greatest feeling in the world when it all happens in an instant, and you don’t have to labour over the intricacies of a song for months on end.
Phil Collins is known for having written songs that appear highly complex and delightfully simple over the duration of his career. During his time as a drummer and eventual lead vocalist with progressive rock band Genesis, things were decidedly more intricate than when he would later turn to release in more of an adult contemporary and sophistic-pop vein in the 1980s and ‘90s, but that isn’t to say that some of his solo material wasn’t also inspired.
With that section of his career in mind, one particular song from his 1993 album Both Sides seemed to come together with ease, and Collins himself seemed particularly proud of it when it was released. The closing track from the album, ‘Please Come Out Tonight’, while a very minimalistic art-pop track, is a tender and delicate ending to the record and one that happened to materialise expeditiously for the songwriter.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday following the album’s release, Collins said of the track that “this song, like a lot of my songs, wrote itself. I remember playing the chords then singing whatever came into my head. I only ever played it once, and this is it.” While he didn’t divulge which other songs came to him similarly, it’s quite a remarkable feat to simply have a song feel complete in one sitting.
The track, as previously mentioned, is a wistful synth-driven track that plods along at a slow pace, allowing the lyrics that Collins longingly sings for his lover’s attention to feel like they’re coming out unprepared, much like a real declaration of love would in general conversation. Knowing that Collins improvised his lines gives the track an extra layer of authenticity that other love songs lack, where there is often an overworked sentimentality that artists can sometimes slide into subconsciously.
Collins revisited the process of writing this song in an interview with Mojo in 2015, stating that the process of writing the song was so rapid that “I’ve forgotten how I wrote it,” he claimed. “I just played. I set up a microphone in my house and sang and what I sang is what you hear. That’s jazz to me”.
There are, of course, more impressive songs that Collins wrote over his career, but having the ability to let words and melody pour out of you at the whim of your own mind is an enviable skill to have and one that the art pop master was seemingly able to perfect the art of.
